Monday chuckles

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 10th, 2019 at 8:27 am and is filed under circus of life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Yes! One of my weirder jobs was proofreading the contract for the palace of the King of Saudi Arabia. I swear I am not making this up. Pages and pages of mind numbing details and legalese, this contract was the size of an encyclopedia. How many nails per how many inches, what specific type of nails, etc etc. I had to make sure there were no missing or misplaced commas, no misspelled words. This was 1977, before spellcheck. Fun!

Well, I wasn’t planning on it. While that was definitely a weird job, my private life has been much weirder.

I was working for a temporary agency in the booming post oil embargo economy in Houston, Texas. When you applied to this particular agency, you were given a lengthy aptitude test to see what areas you excelled in. I scored particularly high in English grammar and spelling, probably because I have been an avid reader since the second grade.

The company that had been hired to build the Saudi Arabian King’s palace called the agency and said they needed a couple of proof readers. So the agency sent me and one other grammar whiz over. We sat together at a table in a private room, each of us with identical stacks of papers that were bound together in files. Each file was a separate “chapter” of the one contract. We took turns reading aloud while the other read silently on the same page. We didn’t find many errors, but we found some.

Don’t worry; I made up/coined this for one of my novels, and I think only the tiniest proportion of readers ‘got it’. Probably less than registered my ‘Wizard Leafings’, who constantly fiddles with wizardly things.